Culture and Artistic Compassion from the Republic of East LA: Stories

Introduction

Uneven results from progressive education, cultural shifts from behaviorism and romanticism, reaction to Russia's Sputnik success, and research that documented major patterns of language acquisition and cognitive and moral development led the view of arts education to shift from creativity and individualistic expression to a view of the arts as “earned conceptual development” (Wolf, 1992). Wolf writes that researchers and educators asserted that students slowly constructed (not discovered) rule systems embedded in the arts of their culture and that, hence, the arts were not simply occasions for self-expression and discovery but more a matter of learning, deserving careful instruction.

At the very least, art courses must attempt to include higher-order thinking skills as curriculum objectives and as the focus of assessment before claiming ownership and responsibility for them. These cognitive skills overlap and involve aspects of each other in various ways; therefore a hierarchical taxonomy is not suggested. Table 40.1 describes the higher-cognitive purposes of art education highlighted by scholars

Theorists reinforces the value of critical thinking common to arts education by asserting its overarching political usefulness of promoting, supporting, and maintaining the aims of a democratic society. Engaging critically with works of art, students practice the ideal democratic skills of suspending judgment, deliberation, debate, decision making, and other values such as tolerating different points of view.

The Culture and Artistic Compassion

The arts and culture make uneasy bedfellows. It is an unease that pervades American sociology even more than he imagined. We should bear in mind that barely two decades have elapsed since a handful of American Sociological Association members succeeded in convincing a necessary quorum of colleagues to sign the petition required to set up a new Section. The Culture Section's growth since then must have come as a surprise even to some of those early supporters.

Culture and the arts have become increasingly visible in sociological publications (Peterson 1976; Becker 1982; Crane 1987; Balfe 1993), disciplinary recognition (Griswold 2000), and professional organizations, both in the United States and elsewhere. But despite the richly textured potential that the arts afford for social science disciplines, it appears that American sociologists continue to devote relatively little attention to them. The success of culture's reentry as a domain of considerable significance in American sociological investigation provides an opportune moment to reexamine the standing of the arts in what should be the most hospitable field of the discipline. ...